Developing a Clearer Vision: Understanding Researcher Motivations and Behaviors in Open Access Publishing

Objectives: Open access (OA) publishing represents an appealing alternative to high collection costs and tight budgets. To facilitate a better understanding of researcher motivations, this analysis seeks to answer the following questions: Does an institutional fund (known as the COPE fund) supporting article processing charges make a difference in researchers' decisions to publish via OA and what motivates researchers to pay for gold OA?

Methods: The analysis consists of two parts: descriptive analysis of the institutional OA fund requests and a bibliometric analysis of institutional gold OA publications. Follow-up surveys identified author motivations.

Part one: The institutional OA fund provides limited reimbursement for article processing charges accrued when publishing in fully OA publications. Many requests are denied due to limited funding or type of journal. Requests from academic biomedical researchers were analyzed by role, amount requested, reason for denial, and nature of final publication. Follow-up surveys were conducted to determine researchers' funding options and publication behaviors.

Part two: Through a bibliometric analysis in Web of Science, institutional OA publication patterns were determined. In addition, cross-referencing these results with institutional subscriptions identified those articles for which researchers chose to pay optional OA charges. Follow-up surveys were conducted with these authors to determine their motivations.

Results:
There were 184 applications (144 unique applicants) to the COPE fund. Most applicants were Assistant or Associate Professors and departments represented were proportional to institutional demographics. Survey results of applicants indicated that most had previous experience with open access publishing. Primary motivations included journal fit, greater potential impact, and colleague recommendations. Analysis of hybrid OA publications showed over 1,200 articles from 2016-2019. Research areas represented among resulting articles mirrored institutional research priorities and were proportional to overall institutional publishing trends. First and last authors were surveyed and primary motivations were personal commitment to open access and greater potential visibility and access.

Conclusions:
A majority of both groups reported previous experience with open access publishing. Compliance with institutional and NIH Public Access Policy were not reported to be primary motivations for publishing as open access .